Analytic Signal

Analytic Signal

In mathematics and signal processing, the analytic representation of a real-valued function or signal facilitates many mathematical manipulations of the signal. The basic idea is that the negative frequency components of the Fourier transform (or spectrum) of a real-valued function are superfluous, due to the Hermitian symmetry of such a spectrum. These negative frequency components can be discarded with no loss of information, providing one is willing to deal with a complex-valued function instead. That makes certain attributes of the signal more accessible and facilitate the derivation of modulation and demodulation techniques, especially single-sideband. As long as the manipulated function has no negative frequency components (that is, it is still analytic), the conversion from complex back to real is just a matter of discarding the imaginary part. The analytic representation is a generalization of the phasor concept: while the phasor is restricted to time-invariant amplitude, phase, and frequency, the analytic signal allows for time-variable parameters.